Profiteer

Tetsami went on. “We are in position at 06:30:00, five days from now. I hack the sat. They’re washed at 06:50:00. That’s when we strike. The ground team breaks the surface. Ivor’s getaway vehicle is waiting down the hole. Shane, Random, Ivor, and Mosasa have three minutes to make it to the edge of the woods. Where they should see this blue dot.” Tetsami pointed to a frozen glowing point isolated all by itself behind the office complex. “This guard’s isolated, all the towers back here are automated, and the other marines are in the quad, the buildings, or on the other side of the complex. Shane hits him with a long-distance stunner—one shot, but it should drop him. That leaves ten minutes for Mosasa to transfer the transponder coding and the data recorder to the modified systems in Shane’s suit. Ivor gets to kill the systems on the marine’s suit and drag him into the woods.”

 

Tetsami accelerated the image of roving guards until the counter read 07:05:00. “By now—if they have any sense at all—they’ll have locked out my RF interference. Shane and Mosasa are inside the screen perimeter. Mosasa has to turn on his cloak—that will hide him from cameras and eyeball search for ten minutes as he follows Shane’s radar shadow. Shane keeps the guard’s rounds. We’re going to rely on Mosasa’s modifications to Shane’s transponder and comm unit here. The guard’s path takes them here.”

 

The holo accelerated to 07:10:00. “Right through the quad. For three minutes, Shane is the only guard patrolling here. Once she stops at the ship, she has that long before someone realizes she’s no longer keeping the other guard’s rounds. She has to be aboard the ship before then. Mosasa has to access the ship’s defense screen through the gap in the landing gear and set up a neural stun field within the ship to take out the five marines on board—”

 

“Wait a minute,” Zanzibar interrupted. “How the hell do you reprogram a whole system on the fly like that, in three minutes?”

 

“Not reprogramming,” said Mosasa softly.

 

“No,” Flower said, “a stun field is part of the command set in the Emerson field software installed in the Blood-Tide. It is part of Confed policy, especially in the Centauri Alliance, to—”

 

“Thank you, Flower,” Tetsami said. “Once the marines are out in the ship, Shane has to get Random to the secondary core in a minute and a half and hook him up. This is the most critical part of the timing. Random has to take charge of the security setup in the space between 07:13:10 and 07:14:40, when there’s no RF traffic between the guards and the ship. The transition has to be seamless, or the perimeter guards might be aware something’s up. Next job Random has is to clear the shipboard security to let Mosasa onboard without a coded transponder, before his cloaking quits.”

 

“Isn’t that cutting it close for Mosasa if he’s only got ten minutes?” asked Zanzibar.

 

“Random will make it,” said Mosasa.

 

“So much for the hard part,” said Tetsami. Levy snorted. “Since the Emerson screen on GA&A is blocking RF signals at this point, we’ll have no comm between the two teams—which is okay. Less radiation for them to detect. However, team two has to assume that the ground team gets in. At exactly 07:25:00, team two is going to punch through into the warehouse sublevel. The subsurface team—Mr. Magnus, Zanzibar, and Levy—has to make their way up a floor and north until they reach the third sublevel of the office complex. This should not be difficult with our guardian angel running security—”

 

Did she actually say that about an AI? She shuddered. “The box we’re cracking is hidden in the midst of plumbing, wiring, and suchlike. Odds are that our TEC friends don’t even know what they’ve got there—so there probably won’t be a guard. Levy is in charge of popping the safe, and inside ...”

 

Tetsami had circumnavigated the table twice, and she was back to her own seat. She turned toward Dom and handed him her remote. She sat and Dom stood up. Dom suddenly seemed to reach a level of presence that he hadn’t had up until then. Suddenly he looked like a CEO, a leader. He sucked in a breath and smiled. It was a small smile, and Tetsami suspected that the only other person to notice it would be Zanzibar.

 

“In that safe,” Dom said, “is four hundred and thirty-five megagrams worth of the future.”

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

 

Conflict of Interest

 

 

“You can never know enough about a man’s self-interest to be able to trust him fully.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“It is a sin peculiar to man to hate his victim.”

—-Cornelius Tacitus

(ca 56-ca 120)

 

 

“Six days ago, in the city of Godwin, three marines from this command were suddenly and deliberately attacked. Corporal Sterling and Corporal Higgins were both killed instantly. Two hours ago the third victim, Sergeant Robert Clay, died from extensive burns over ninety percent of his body.”